See what broke our snow anchor pickets!

three two one yeah oh we broke the picket you guys have been requesting a lot snow anchors i probably get a message a day for that i don't know what do you know about snow anchors it's really dependent on the snow so you're saying there's only one type of snow and everything they see in this video is the only thing they'll ever need to learn everything about snow anchors of course oh no it's coming out oh that's a bummer you guys got snow on my glove so yeah we're in the cascades snow quality pass we have what's called what's known around here is cascade concrete gets really heavy and wet especially in february and so we're going to kind of look at the snow layers to see what we have for today and that will change early season late season rocky mountains are going to have drier snow the wasatch mountains are going to have different snow so you definitely want to dig somewhat of a little pit to see what your conditions are to know what the best anchor to use so the first thing we did was kind of carved out a little pit here at least two ish feet and i have a snow thermometer minus two degrees celsius the best way to do is kind of just feel the layers with your fingers and see like where it gets soft like it got soft there and like it's really soft there and really soft so this is all the snow that's settled down as you as it melted over the last few weeks that'll just help us know like how deep we need to make anchors how deep how big of an anchor we need to make and what tools to use for that what kind of anchor do you want to build now that's what we're gonna find that's why we're here all right hi joe hi ryan you look familiar have we met so we've got ourselves a jigger laying on the ground here which is just a piggyback haul system so to speak it's a five to one tied to a nice little fir tree here of just barely adequate diameter and we'll be doing our anchors up on the slope up here a little wonky looking the pelican box actually has the load cell in it which will keep it from getting damaged it just looks funny but yeah that's our system we'll just be pulling on this rope here downhill on a five to one to test the anchors and then we've also got a drill winch we'll use if we can't pull hard enough so our first thing we're going to do is your classic picket with a top clip on it generally know that this is the weakest one but it's also probably the one you're going to do if you're right here at ice axe arrest and your partner's hanging a crass you need to do something you're probably going to do this right here and just to clarify we got going here this blue webbing is just back tied to something so that this picket doesn't come down and spear us through the brain while we're pulling on it and then this is the load cell in a protective case and this is our pulley system here all right let's go pull so the ice layer was like three or four inches though you had over there in the pit yeah and then underneath that that same sugar layer that's still still persistent but the ice on top has gotten a lot smaller last weekend was like a good six inches yeah it held a picket quite quite well okay next we'll do a two foot picket with a mid clip point on it cable clip generally known these are much better than the top clip so we're going to prove it the trick with the mid clip is you got to get the cable cut through the snow you do that by someone stepping on it and yanking on it or with the snow saw cut a little channel you don't want to dig because you don't want to loosen all the snow in front of the picket you just want to slice that cable through if you don't slice the cable through then it's coming down an angle and actually pull the picket up so you got to get it cut into where it's coming perpendicular off the picket yeah i thought it would pop right out but it's making its way back to where it was it came out it came out the same hole it just slid down the because because you were like this which put it right into that sugar layer made it just do that let's try doing it like that hey ron can you pull this please now anything else you need me to do so since we can't get the vertical ones to stick very well we're gonna do the next one which is a t-slot stomp your picket down and then and for these it's the snow in front you want to hold so you can borrow from behind you want this this is where the wire comes in handy because you can kind of you want that to be in the fall line or in your pole in this case wouldn't that naturally happen get pulled in in line because so if it's if this is harder what can happen is it'll pull the it'll act as a pivot point so if you're not in the line yeah if it's hard doing this and pulling bury all of it so this was a three foot picket with about a three foot cable extension or cable lanyard oh no nothing's safe we got it oh look at you guys you're so strong can you build two and equalize it if you had the equipment is that a thing you guys would do if you're like yeah yeah the next step would be add more add more we're seeing here is we'd have to have like 17 pretty much every one of those pickets yeah so we're gonna use one of ryan's favorite soft shackles oh damn wow you finally built an anchor that works you need some help oh we broke the picket so that's what msr said happens that that wasn't attached that was just in front no it was attached to that one this one was just sitting in front was this the vertical that was the horizontal so it was horizontal and it rotated probably when we pulled it bounced and rotated and just folded filled the flange and then these holes are rated around 2,000 pounds you clip a beam of that and pull but we will find out in a minute the hole will blow out of 2,000 pounds but apparently well and bend it at less than that i want to know so now we have 18 inch pickets oh no oh we pulled it through how did that happen oh this got stuck in the snow oh no i don't know if we're getting that out oh we are i can't open it whoa that was a dynamic event so 8.14 is the mbs of my box if you're cold need to warm up digging a snowball is a great way to do that it can also be a pretty good anchor um our conditions today are uh terrible for any kind of picket anchors as we've been showing you so we're gonna try the snowballard which is basically just digging this ditch up here in the snow putting something to pad on here and then wrapping the rope around this horn which we're just slinging this this snow horn here with rope using that as an anchor the big danger is that the rope will just cut through it so we pad it with something like a backpack or foam sleeping pads things like that rope bags work um doesn't really take a whole lot pad it and then basically with these things always work because you just make them bigger and bigger and bigger so what's the failure mechanism here if the bag if it doesn't cut through the snow is it takes chunk of snow we'll give okay yep but this is our good layer this is the layer we like it's the sugarcrab underneath we don't get a chance at this top i brought my alpine climbing lightweight rope your 15 mil alpine half rope this is ridiculous well let me show it next to you i guess that's what we're using i can hear you pulling action oh yeah this is very interesting yeah you finally cinched the bag down yeah this is we've uh we've reached our limit three two one 6.19 it's the mbs of bollard and another one where it's a vertical with a horse or sorry horizontal with a vertical in front of it only we used two foot pickets instead of three foot pickets and what's your theory about that uh hopefully not to break the two foot picket two one pull what's our force um a broken pelican case oh more nine five i'm just impressed we're getting these numbers we broke the cable extension at the cramp i will note this this is the one we pulled on earlier though so where's the back of my box oh yeah but this does show that the three foot picket broke in half yeah at a km less than the two foot picket that's pretty cool which is kind of impressive the midpoint is better and i think that was when we had the hardest time failing as one single thing one single um piece of one single picket uh the dead man is usually what we do in sar it's usually the strongest i think we proved that here um in these snow conditions we did have to do two and equalize them to get really strong enough for a rescue load that's very doable takes four tickets and gear but unfortunately in sar we have gear lots of gear and people usually do you have large teams in sar yeah okay yeah around here we do seattle area yeah we definitely have large teams so so you never just trust your life to just one of these i mean i mean in climbing you could but in these conditions i wouldn't this these conditions are pretty iffy for any kind of snow anchor um the bollard was strong enough as a single point do we have some different ice that we can test it could go over to the hard pan the compacted stuff on the side of the road here would be uh definitely different than what we've been playing in today uh it gets compacted and groomed over and over and over so the sugar layer that we're fighting here is it going to be consolidated over there so that would be actually fun uh just to show how strong a single picket can be yeah let's uh let's see if we can break one of those if you want to see another day oh god wait till i'm done with my spiel if you want to see us test this all again in different snow conditions we can do that um if you want us to test different things let us know in the comment section is how i'm going to know what direction to go people just been requesting this a long time and i wanted to uh just start because i don't know where to start snow's new to me but this i think is funny and if you guys want to grab a shirt go ahead um yeah this is our dummy decker and uh we think it's funny it's not making fun of spread i think it's a great organization i just think our dummy is silly looking and he's splat certified head over to how not to swag.com if you want a shirt if you hashtag how not to swag on instagram if you post a photo i'll take that photo and put on the end of a video and uh go to extremegear.org to buy stuff let's uh break the next thing because the snow sucks over there we're in uh where they groom which is going to be really hard and packed and consolidated snow so we're going to try the vertical pickets in this kind of snow because we know it's going to be really consolidated and did you clip the top eye so this is a three foot long picket clipped to the very top eye so we got 4.46 on the top eye of that three foot picket that it did bend a little bit it did bend a little bit it pulled out easier than we thought but it pulled out three or four times more than when we had it on that crap up there oh that's gonna happen there's that hole and there's that hole so in the book down by andy patrick he suggested uh a glove with a candy bar and since we forgot a snickers we got some uh coban we're gonna stick coban in this glove and we're gonna bury it in a t-groove style and we're gonna girth hitch our or i'll just probably clove this amazing 12 braid vectrin i've got it on ebay so it could technically be anything and i wouldn't know if it was right or not um so yeah we'll see if that holds anything and i'm gonna be gloveless if we can't pull it out it works really well we gotta do the slot in front of it too oh no it's coming out oh that's a bummer you guys got snow on my glove open coban 2kn so uh wrap on that you technically could especially a low angle wrap right because low angles can only be what a half a k in ah that's usable not terrible here you go doctor see you pull that out for a patient well we've got like a rainy sleety day in the cascades here we're having snow for several weeks and so i don't know i probably still call it typical conditions for the uh concrete here but still it could definitely be a lot better end of this episode you're supposed to use the pointy side that way you don't poke yourself yeah wait it's all about perception right you do it like this it's all about